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Sisters and joint managing directors Kate Bendall and Louise Laver lead Connect Catering, the contract caterer founded by their father, John Herring, at the family dining table in 1989 — and this year’s mid-size Best Company to Work For.

Laver and Bendall took over from dad in 2014, and have “more or less” always worked for Connect. They have two more sisters, one of them in charge of human resources at the firm. All of the company’s 70-odd contracts are within two hours’ reach of head office in Wallingford, Oxfordshire. “The core part of what we do is fresh and local. Fresh cakes, fresh salads, fresh innovations,” explains Bendall. Most sites are run by teams of three led by chef-managers, with a few going up to 15 or 20 staff, while clients are mainly businesses and schools, plus some hospices and training centres.

Laver points out that food has become as fashionable in a contract setting as it is elsewhere. “The staff restaurant is a company benefit,” she says. “It’s a place to come to and mix with people, which helps with the client’s own staff engagement.”

Culinary flair is encouraged, and the firm has its own trainers delivering full courses and refreshers in kitchen skills such as sushi preparation, sugarcraft, catering for special diets, artisan breadmaking, dry ice and fish cookery. Innovation trips such as a recent outing to street food stalls in east London and to trade shows also help keep employees’ passion for food alive.

“We don’t make people cook a certain way,” Laver says — although “it has to be fresh. No freezers full of ready-prepared things. People go into catering because they love food, and if you take away the cooking they get demotivated.”

High salaries are not the draw in the contract catering industry — nobody at Connect earns more than £100,000 a year, while a typical food service assistant takes home £11,000. But that does not prevent the company’s staff from returning the most positive results in our employee engagement survey. Members of the workforce say managers are good listeners (an 84% positive score) who care about their staff’s job satisfaction (84%), are motivational (82%) and would react swiftly if anybody in their team seemed to be under stress (84%). People’s health does not suffer from working here (86%) and they do not feel under too much pressure to perform well (80%).

With a flourish of her down-to-earth management style, Laver says: “If someone’s safety shoes hurt, we’ll buy new ones — it’s as simple as that.” Bookkeeping may not come as naturally as whipping up a fluffy Victoria sponge does to one of the firm’s employees, but that is no problem — help is always at hand at the other end of a phone call to head office. After all, as Laver says, “their passion is catering, their passion isn’t a keyboard.” As to why more organisations fail to adopt such commonsense approaches to winning the loyalty of employees, she smiles: “Well, we do wonder.”

The sisters are convinced that focusing on staff engagement helps Connect win contracts. “We get really smiley people who we love working with, and our clients are happy,“ says Bendall. She adds that the arrival of motivated, skilled and cheerful staff cause a big upward spike in meals eaten whenever the company takes over a contract. “That doesn’t impact us, it impacts the client by the value for money we give.” And it is interesting to note that the teams transferred to Connect management under TUPE (transfer of undertakings — protection of employment rules) also rediscover their work mojo. “It seems to be that how you treat staff makes a huge difference to their performance level,” Laver says.

Connect’s next goal is to achieve 100 contracts, but 120 is the cap on their ambitions. “We want to keep the personal touch,” she explains, “because otherwise you lose what you are.”

Bosses who don’t just talk the talk

Williams & Co’s Ray Stafford with two of his colleaguesTOM STOCKILL

Chasing payments is routine in any business but requesting an invoice for goods that you have received but not been charged for is rather more unusual, writes Jo Gunston. Yet that is what Williams & Co managing director Ray Stafford did when his trade-only plumbing supplies firm received two vanloads of boilers but were only invoiced for one.

“You’re sitting there and you’ve got a choice to make,” Stafford says at his head office in Fareham, Hampshire. “We could just quietly forget this. We didn’t.”

Stafford says every decision taken by the business, no 76 on this year’s mid-size Best Companies list, is reached with its values in mind. Integrity, ambition and loyalty are intrinsic to Williams & Co’s success and Stafford leads the way in doing the right thing, even when nobody is looking.

Its 304 employees are expected to feel the same and new starters at the rapidly growing company are told: “If you think upholding values is airy-fairy nonsense, you need to work somewhere else.” The firm offers same-day delivery of products such as boilers, tools and pipes to plumbers in mainland UK locations, supplying mainly small operators with between one and five workers. Its larger competitors may at times beat Williams & Co on price, Stafford says, “but we should never, ever, be beaten on service”.

Tom Baigrie, the founder of life insurance broker LifeSearch (no 3 on the list), also runs his London-based firm on strong values, including care, honesty and openness. Nobody has their own office at this operation and when Baigrie makes one of his regular visits to the company’s three sites, he sets to work at the first free desk he finds. He might be sitting next to the newest team member or a group manager, and strikes up conversation with his neighbour; the practice gives him real insight into staff concerns.

Beaverbrooks (no 10) sells jewellery and watches but the company says its main focus is to enrich lives by making a positive difference in the world. Chairman Mark Adlestone has given blood 85 times, and the 39-year veteran of the Lancashire-based outfit shares his experiences on workplace platform Yammer to inspire and motivate colleagues. Managing director Anna Blackburn, meanwhile, joins workplace initiatives such as cooking for homelessness charity Streetlife under a commitment from the company that its 917-strong workforce would commit 700 days to volunteering last year.

There is more than simple altruism to leadership by example. The best company bosses create the happiest and most engaged workforces, who pay them back in loyalty and productivity.

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February 24 2019

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